Why it’s just fine to fail at “successful aging”

This project began 11 years ago as a project about people over 80 who work. Upbeat! Inspirational! Safe! I didn’t realize it at the time, but the project epitomized an approach that has dominated gerontology since the 1980s: “successful aging”— also known as “active,” “healthy,” or “productive” aging. For most of human history, aging was seen as a natural process largely beyond our control. Enter the “successful aging” model, which posits something close to the opposite: eat right, stay fit, choose well, have a good attitude, be “productive,” and we can craft the old age we want. The model emerged to counter to the prevailing narrative of aging as loss and decline alone, and it’s deeply appealing.

Something about this way of thinking made me uneasy, and I was lucky to get a gentle course correction early on from geriatrician Robert Butler, the inventor of the term ageism and one of the older workers I interviewed. “If you get up in the morning and get yourself dressed, you’re being productive,” he told me. Or, as I put it more bluntly years later, “If you wake up in the morning, you’re aging successfully.” As I came to realize, healthy behaviors and “can-do” strategies are terrific, but they can’t hold aging at bay—nor is that something we should aspire to. An active, healthy 65 is still 65, not “the new 50.” Imagining otherwise is denial—a high-end version that overlooks the very important role of socioeconomic class, along with race, gender, and just plain luck, in shaping how “successfully” we age. It leaves behind those who aren’t wealthy or healthy enough to age the “right” way, and it feeds the denial in which ageism takes root.

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Advancing Smartly, a project of Elder Law of Michigan, Inc., provides resources to maintain independence, age with dignity, and improve quality of life through economic security, legal resolutions, and much-needed peace of mind.

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